we are running a literacy magazine for a few years now. On reading-walls and online on classic web pages.
Now we are taking our back-editions and put them into RAB to benefit from the audio-plus-highlight-feature and from the distribution via Playstore and Bluetooth.
For ethical reasons, we always clearly distinguish between journalism and advertising. Our magazine is entirely non-commercial but still we have advertising, and want to show clearly what is what.
So in RAB I have seen the known styles marked \p \s1 etc.
Now I want to split those styles into two series and use \pj for journalism and \pa for advertising.
For many details in RAB we have seen the “Add new item” button, but we cannot find “Add style”.
Now please do not tell me that I do not want this. I want two sets of styles. If you can give me bonus CSS like features to distinguish journalism from adverts, you are welcome to write too. Maybe pages which use a separate colours-scheme or whatever, but we hope to achieve this by font-styles mainly.
Since our magazine has an established styles catalog (for example keeping sans-serifs mainly for advertising) we do not need to confuse our readers if RAB can handle it.
I have seen many fluffy styles in RAB which we might “abuse” to create our second series, like “poetry”. I hope poetry never makes it into our magazine in any serious quantity. So we could just re-define those styles for our needs and assign fonts etc. to those. But it would make it harder for my team to prepare the pages. Because the SFM would be named rather randomly that way. A bigger set of styles including two sub-sets of custom SFM (which seem to be based on USFM anyway) would make our lives muchly easier.
If “add style” does not exist (and I cannot find it for that profound reason), I humbly propose it as a useful new feature and hope for many “me-toos” from other users.
RAB is great, we are getting more and more into it. Thank you developper or team of devs.
Martin, you could always (in the meantime, until your feature request comes through) mark-up your source with these \pa and \pj styles (keeping your team happy and simple), but then make predictable changes (using the Regex changes feature) to the styles when the app is built. So for example, \pa > \q and \pj > p so that the output gives you the difference in display that you’re seeking.
I just noticed in the list of all threads, that you have actually activated a voting-thingy right here in this forum. So what are the rules? Can I start a nice campaign and give sweets, cash and t-shirts to people? Is there a “correct place” where I would list all the benefits of letting users create their custom styles?
People, if you search for “RAB” or “more awesome” or “free t-shirts” or “app of the year 2018” or “we love RAB” or “roadmap to the best RAB ever”, please find this thread and vote “YES, please”. Thank you; you will not regret this, styles are useful, free styles are opening new horizons…
I also promise, not to use Comic Sans for 24 hours, for every vote this feature request will receive.
Disclosure: Not knowing that it is forbidden, I have voted for my own idea, giving one of my precious few votes, to show that I believe in it.
Thank you @MarkP, this is why I love a forum. Your idea is great and we will try that this week. The person in charge of making the apps with our local team will return today from travel.
I will sit with them and we will write our custom hack-the-poetry-style-lists. I was not sarcastic about keeping our team happy: I will let them chose what markers they want. Maybe on this occasion we can re-work the entire list of markers and make it more mnemonic for Francophone people - if they want.
We will figure out how many extra styles we need for advertising and which ones we can abuse for that purpose. Then configure those styles.
I will then show the team how the regex changes work and let them do a very transparent test-page, where they can see what does what. It will be fun for me, to explain how and why we need to escape the backslash, for people who have never worked with regexes and who have never deeply considered the beauty and awesomeness (still not sarcastic) of SFM.
Does anybody run a list or site of showcases like “made by RAB”? Not claiming our efforts are good enough for a “showcase”. But we could at least do some spying or lists ours for comparison.
Thank you @richard for this good news (or even for making this happen, if you were the programmer on this). The timing is great, as we are presently working on our edition 10. So I will download and install the new version this afternoon (internet permitting) and am keen to have a look.
We have finally started making (compiling) our first magazine apps today, using the still new custom styles. Thank you again for those.
We discovered that we do not fully understand the new work flow. We can easily define new styles. But they are not listed as “paragraph”, “heading”, “poetry” in the main styles list. What do we need to fill-in to make our custom styles show up in all lists inside the App Builder PC program?
We can apply (mark up) our custom styles fine in the source documents - and the output does render those styles correctly. Yeah.
But we did not observe that the main CSS in the project folder was updated. And we do not know where or how our custom styles are being stored as part of a certain project on the PC.
Maybe a few lines of “help” in the documentation, would make this very powerful new feature even more useful to even more users. Please. And thank you.
Edit/update: Just to be clear, my team has figured this out - so those new styles are working great. Our first magazine has been finished today and I like what the extra styles have done for the page layouts.
So just the IT guy on the team (me) would like to know more; but not problem with this new feature.
We did it! Thanks to the ever-more-powerful RAB and based on our anniversary edition (a humble no. 10) we put an entire 20 page A3-size magazine into an app.
You will notice the absence of audio, but the with-audio version is already in preparation. The recordings are done, and our local specialist is aligning the written with the spoken stuff.
Both versions (with audio and without audio) will be offered next to each other, because advanced readers do not need the extra megabytes downloaded or hogging their phone-memory.
I will post our Google Play link here in appreciation of the new custom-styles-feature. Please note the “category bars” on top of each page (first custom style). They say things like animal keeping, health, humor, sports, nutrition, knowledge, legal matters, advertising, childrens-page, etc.
Please note that advertising pages (entitled ĘŠkĘŠl) now look typographically distinct from the journalistic pages. And no fear, we are still very much non-profit. Those adverts are meant to educate our readers about the difference between publicity and journalism. They are partnership-favours and not paid in money.
The small black GĘŠGĘŠ logo at the end of each article is also realized via a custom character-style.
We are exited, that the app can include working web-links (bottom of page 1 for example). That way we can refer our users/readers to the next or previous editions and to other goodies.
Thank you team (or lonely hero) which (who) is making those app-builders!